Part of The Pirate Bay's decision to go torrent-less was to make the site more resistant to outside attacks, but it also has quite an impact on bandwidth bills. The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak today that after the switch the site now consumes 30 percent less bandwidth, while the number of visitors remains stable. Despite some annoyances most users appear to be fine with the new magnet-only site.

Last week The Pirate Bay deleted all popular .torrent files from its site, replacing them with so-called magnet links.

This means that instead of downloading the .torrent files directly from a central server, they will be downloaded from other BitTorrent users instead.

One of the consequences of this move is that The Pirate Bay has seen a massive drop in bandwidth consumption. The size of the impact became clear today when the site’s operators informed TorrentFreak that bandwidth usage has dropped by nearly a third.

“We now use 30 percent less bandwidth, but the number of visitors to the site remains the same,” we were told.

The drop is even more impressive, approximately 60 percent, when the Pirate Bay’s RSS-feed is excluded. Of all bandwidth generated by the popular file-sharing site today nearly half comes from the RSS feed.

But there are not only upsides to a torrent-less Pirate Bay. Large groups of users have experienced problems when trying to overcome the minor annoyances that magnets bring with them.

One of the most heard complaints is that it’s impossible to select individual files before starting a download. This can be problematic when people need only one single file from a huge archive. When downloading a .torrent people can select the file in question in a window before starting the download, but with magnets uTorrent users can’t (it it supported by BitComet and Vuze).

A possible fix for this can be to keep the detail window open until the full torrent has been downloaded. Obviously, these are issues for BitTorrent client developers and not The Pirate Bay.

Following The Pirate Bay’s switch to magnets the uTorrent development team have already addressed one magnet-related bug, one that made it impossible to resume or reseed downloads when a magnet was re-added to the download queue.

Despite the issues mentioned above the transition appears to have gone smoothly.

For The Pirate Bay the switch to magnets was necessary, as it makes the site more resistant to being shut down. It’s easier to move around and takes only a fraction of the resources that were previously needed. And as an added bonus it reduces the bandwidth bills.